Every year millions of people, companies, and other institutions file various documents with the different governing bodies, such as agencies and services of local, state and national governments. The documents may be directed toward filing taxes, inventory and accounting filings, medical reimbursement filings, etc.
Each document is typically designed around the concept of forms. Specifically, a document may be composed of one or more forms. A form includes multiple data-containing fields and static text describing and relating to the data containing fields. The fields may be user-generated or calculated. A user-generated field is a field which has data from the user or an outside resource. A calculated field is a field in which the data in the field is the output of an equation involving other fields.
Each field in document is typically entered with data representing a concatenation of various pieces of information. For example, on an accounting sheet, the data representing a summary of pension fund payments may include several pieces of information (e.g., the amount of pension fund payments paid, the amount of pension funds due, the amount of pension funds remaining).
Accordingly, a form may be a source form and/or a target form. A source form contains the information to enter into a target form. Thus, a source form is often generated by an outside source other than the person filing the document.
Software products include several methods for simplifying inputting the data into the documents. For example, a software product may include a worksheet having a questionnaire. The worksheet is typically a target form with the questionnaire in static text. The user answers the questions or inputs text in user-modifiable fields.
For example, a person receiving a pension may use information from a source form from a previous employer to enter data in an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) target form. The information may be used in multiple fields or may be concatenated with other information into a single field.
Often, source forms are related by having similar treatment of the same data. Specifically, the field names within the family may change however, data from the source forms in the same family may use similar calculations to create the target form. For example, the tax treatment of annuities listed on Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Forms CSA-1099-R and CSF-1099-R are essentially the same as the tax treatment of annuities on IRS Form 1099-R. Accordingly, a user, ignoring the static text describing the fields, may use data from OPM Form CSA-1099-R and OPM Form CSF-1099-R to fill in IRS Form 1099-R and obtain correct calculations for the user's taxes. Thus, a user having an OPM Form CSA-1099-R may ignore the static text questionnaire to enter data into the worksheet that describes the IRS Form 1099-R.